Ireland and the Home Rule Movement

by Sir Michael McDonnell

[217]Mr. Redmond committed himself or his colleagues to anything further than to consider the Bill in a critical but not a hostile spirit. As to the suggestion that a vote for the first reading and the printing of the Bill in any sense involved the party in even a modified acceptance of the measure, in doing so the Irish members were acting in fulfilment of a pledge given by Mr. Redmond six months before, when, speaking on September 23rd, he said:—

"When the scheme is produced it will be anxiously and carefully examined. It will be submitted to the judgment of the Irish people, and no decision will be come to, whether by me or by the Irish Party, until the whole question has been submitted to a National Convention. When the hour of that Convention comes any influence which I possess with my fellow-countrymen will be used to induce them firmly to reject any proposal, no matter how plausible, which, in my judgment, may be calculated to injure the prestige of the Irish Party and disrupt the National movement, because my first and my greatest policy, which overshadows everything else, is to preserve a united National Party in Parliament, and a United powerful organisation in Ireland, until we have achieved the full measure of National freedom to which we are entitled."

If the Irish Party had not voted for the first reading we should have been told by their critics that their action was a despotic attempt to override and smother the freely-expressed opinions of the Irish people, but it must not be forgotten that it is due to Mr. Redmond's own initiative that in the case of this Bill, as in the case of the Land Bill of 1903, the final decision has rested, not, as in the case of the Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893, with the members of the Parliamentary Party, but, by a sort of referendum, with a National Convention containing representative Irishmen elected for the purpose from every part of the country in the most democratic manner.

[218]It is worthy of attention that the very people who five years ago were declaring in Great Britain that Home Rule was dead and damned were those who were loudest during the general election in the attempt to raise latent prejudice on that score, and to bring it to pass that the condition of things existing twenty years ago was repeated when, as Lord Salisbury declared in a speech to the National Conservative Club, "all the politics of the moment are summarised in the one word—Ireland."

In spite of these facts, Mr. Balfour, speaking on the first reading of the Council Bill, was constrained to admit that it bore no resemblance to any plan which the Irish people had ever advocated, and he went on to declare his inability to see how by any process of development it was capable of being turned into anything which the Nationalists ever contemplated. The unanimity with which the Bill was repudiated by Nationalist public opinion in Ireland is to be seen from the fact that not a single voice was raised on its behalf at the National Convention, comprising 3,000 delegates, which was the most representative meeting of any kind which has ever been held in Ireland. The reasons for its rejection are to be read in the light of the repeatedly expressed opinions of the more radical section of the Ministerial Party, to the effect that a bolder and more comprehensive scheme might have been well introduced without any infringement of the election pledges of the Government. Under Clause 3 the Lord Lieutenant, an officer under the new régime, as now, of a British Ministry, would have been empowered to act in defiance of the opinion of the Council either by modifying their resolutions as to Executive action or by overriding them by orders of his own, or rather of the Ministry of which he was a member. On points such as this dealing with the constitution of the assembly, Mr. Redmond was able to inform the Convention that no amendments would be accepted by the Government, and experience has

[219]taught Irishmen that although these powers might generally, under a Liberal Government, be exercised in a legitimate manner, under a Unionist Lord Lieutenant they would be exercised in a despotic fashion, just as, in the words of the Estates Commissioners themselves, the instructions issued by the Lord Lieutenant in February, 1905, were designed "seriously to impede the expeditious working of the Land Act of 1903." Great objection was taken to the fact that the resources of the Council would be such as to effect little administrative improvement, since the departments under its control were the very bodies which demanded increased expenditure, while it left untouched the Police, the Prisons' Board, and the Judiciary, the reckless extravagance of which afforded obvious sources from which, by modification of their wasteful expense, one could make large economies for the benefit of those portions of the Irish service which at the present moment are starved.

Though it may be said that the acceptance of the Bill without prejudice would not have stultified the principles already vindicated in a long struggle by the Irish people, the body as constituted, it was felt, would have served the purpose of the Unionist party by dividing without a sufficient quid pro quo the attention of the Irish people from their devotion to the cause for the broad principles of which they have been striving, and there was this further danger that a body so restricted in its scope and anti-democratic in its administration would have broken down in action, and would have in this way provided Unionists with the very strongest possible argument for opposition to a full autonomy.

While a certain proportion of Liberals are prepared to admit that the Bill made havoc of Liberal principles there is a Laodicean section who have greatly blamed Irish Nationalists for having refused what was offered them, when having asked for bread they were given a stone. To such people as I have in

[220]mind I should like to quote what Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Hartington on November 10th, 1885:—

"If that consummation—the concession to Ireland of full power to manage her own local affairs—is in any way to be contemplated, action at a stroke will be more honourable, less unsafe, less uneasy than the jolting process of a series of partial measures."[^[28]]